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The book on Weaver: He was best ever

I doubt you'd find any umpires who'd agree, but there's no doubt in my mind that Earl Weaver, who died at the age of 82 a few days ago, is the greatest baseball manager of all time.

There are managers who won a lot more career games and managers who won more pennants and World Series than Weaver. But Weaver, who never managed any other major-league team but the Orioles, was the whole package and a manager ahead of his time.

You always hear about managers who "go by the book" or "go against the book." Well, have you ever seen "the book?"

You won't find it on the shelf at any bookstore because it doesn't exist. Or didn't, at least until Weaver wrote it. I had been writing about baseball for nearly 30 years when I finally saw a copy for the first time.

It was a gift from Red Sox first base coach Arnie Beyeler, who was managing the Lowell Spinners at the time, and it's really not a book at all. It's a 12-page pamphlet entitled "Modern Baseball Strategy."

The original author was Paul Richards, another revolutionary thinker who managed the Orioles a few years before Weaver took over the team. Weaver just kept adding to it.

Before there were sabermetricians, there was Earl Weaver. Nowadays teams have reams of computer printouts with all sorts of statistical information. Weaver kept the stats -- the relevant stats anyway -- on hand-written index cards that became known to baseball insiders as "weavers.

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If Lee May, who might be on a 12-game hitting streak with five homers and 13 RBI, wanted to know why he wasn't playing against the Red Sox if Luis Tiant was pitching, Weaver could tell him it's because he was 2-for-29 lifetime against Tiant with 17 strikeouts. No one else in baseball back in those days had that kind of information, but Weaver did.

Many times I and the other Boston writers would visit Weaver in his office during the afternoon before a game and watch him flip through his "weavers," deciding who was going to play and who wasn't, while we listened to his entertaining anecdotes.

Over-managing a no-no

He never said it directly, not to me anyway, but it was clear he felt the biggest disadvantage his rivals had was that they were guilty of over-managing. In Weaver's mind, baseball games were won with good pitching and three-run homers. He had nothing but disdain for stolen bases, hit-and-run plays, sacrifice bunts, and squeeze plays.

"Your most precious possessions are your 27 outs," he wrote. "If you play for one run, that's all you'll get. Don't play for one run unless you know that run will win the ballgame."

Once, just for the heck of it, I wanted to find out if Weaver was truly right about the three-run homer, even with good pitching taken out of the equation. I checked the results of Red Sox games over a period of several years and discovered they had won 82% of the games in which they hit a three-run homer or grand slam. At that rate, if a team hit a three-run homer every day over the course of an entire season, that club would go 133-29 in a 162-game schedule, no matter how mediocre its pitching staff was.

The impish Weaver was always fun to chat with. He had a terrific sense of humor and a sarcastic wit which did not always endear him to his players. Weaver and three-time Cy Young winner Jim Palmer were nearly always at odds.

When Palmer complained one time that Weaver wasn't using him properly, Weaver snapped: "I've given him more chances than I gave my first wife."

Outfielder Pat Kelly, a born-again Christian, had this exchange with his manager:

"Skip, do you ever read the Good Book?"

"I look at it now and then."

"You have to walk with the Lord, Skip."

"Pat, I'd rather you walk with the bases loaded."

Kelly was undeterred.

"Skip, when was the last time you got down on your knees and prayed?"

"The last time I sent you up to pinch hit."

Weaver was the bane of umpires. He once tore a rule book to shreds in front of an umpire and was ejected.

The year after umpire Larry Barnett had refused to call the Reds' Ed Armbrister out for interfering with Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk in the 1975 World Series, a ruling that cost the Red Sox the game and ultimately the Series, the same play happened in an Orioles game. Weaver came out to argue.

"Yeah," Weaver replied. "You got it wrong then and you got it wrong now. I was so ticked off when you screwed it up the first time I kicked in my TV set."

During the tight pennant race of 1975, the Orioles came to Fenway for a key mid-September series against the Red Sox. Red Sox outfielder and resident flake Bernie Carbo had a bronze statue of Buddha on the shelf of his locker, and he'd told the writers he'd named it Weaver because of Buddha's pot belly.

The pot-bellied Weaver was aware of Carbo's comment but said nothing until after a Red Sox fan threw a dummy wearing an Orioles uniform onto the field in front of the Baltimore dugout. Weaver had come out and kicked the dummy into the dugout.

After the Orioles had lost the game, the press asked Weaver about the dummy.

"Who did it look like?" they inquired.

"I thought it looked like Carbo," he cracked.

He had his demons

Weaver knew exactly what writers were looking for and was always accommodating. When Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy was a beat writer covering the Orioles in the late '70s, he remembered that Weaver was sensitive to the plight of writers who had to rush to file stories before catching airplanes on getaway days. To save them precious time, Weaver would tell them they didn't need to come down from the press box to his office after the game.

"If we win, this is what I'll say. And if I lose, this is what I'll say," he told them, giving them the quotes they needed in advance.

As great a manager as Earl Weaver was, he had his demons, too, and Baltimore was the perfect place for him. He had a problem with alcohol and was arrested a couple of times in Maryland for DWI.

In Baltimore it was no big deal, and his job was secure.

But had he been managing in Boston, New York, and maybe even 90 miles north in Philadelphia, it would have been front page news and the lead stories on the local TV stations. Such indiscretions would likely have cost him his job and maybe even ruined a Hall of Fame managing career.

Earl Weaver wasn't close to being a perfect human being. But he was as close to being the perfect baseball manager as anyone will ever come.

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